


frost on a wire fence

by younghoon



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: (it is like 1k), Canon Compliant, Character Study, Coming of Age, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Kuroko/Basketball, Light Angst, like 1k words too long, really obscure romance if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-17 23:42:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7290847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younghoon/pseuds/younghoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone falls apart, and Kuroko tries to hold himself together. </p><p> </p>
            </blockquote>





	frost on a wire fence

**Author's Note:**

> please proceed with extreme caution

Kuroko is five years-old. It’s sunny outside, and warm. It feels nice. He picks up a crayon and colours the sky in his picture blue - pale, pale blue, eggshell blue, the colour of his hair blue. He doesn’t want to colour. He sets his crayon down and flips the page over. The blue is barely visible through the paper, so he picks up another crayon and draws a circle, colours it orange. Draws thick, black lines through it looks like what he wants it to be. No. He doesn’t want to colour. He doesn’t even want to draw. He looks outside. No; he wants to play basketball.  
  
You must understand though, this is harder than it sounds. Kuroko is sickly and pale and weak, bones thin and hollow as a bird’s, thin enough to snap with one bare hand. He can’t play basketball. It’s better for him to stay inside and colour; colour skies pretty, pale, Kuroko-hair blue, colour basketballs orange, suns golden yellow and flowers red and orange and purple.  
  
Kuroko can’t play basketball. He draws a boy next to the orange and black circle, a stick figure with roughly drawn arms and legs and a shock of Kuroko’s-hair blue on top of his head. Adds a smiley face. Kuroko can’t play basketball.  
  
He doesn’t care though. He is five years-old, and not old enough to understand yet. But, he wants to.  
  
  
  
Kuroko is six years-old. His grandmother sits next to him. She will die in three months, although he doesn’t know this yet. She doesn’t either - or shouldn’t, anyways. It’s hard to tell with grandmother. She smiles at him, fondly, and lays a hand, wrinkled, parchment skinned, on his shoulder. Kuroko blinks up at her.  
  
“Tetsuya,” she says to him, “you won’t disappear again, will you?” - he has just run off somewhere, or so she thinks, but in reality, he has been standing there the whole time. “Sometimes, I think you’re frost - frost on a wire fence, like the one you see out there in the window. I’ll put my hand on it, and it’s there, but when I look back” - she smiles again - “it’s gone! Melted, into thin air. Isn’t that interesting, Tetsuya?”  
  
He nods, not really understanding. He doesn’t think he’s like frost on a wire fence, or a wood fence, or anything at all. He’s a person. People are not frost. But he doesn’t say anything, because he’s young, and he’s wrong. He’s wrong a lot. Wrong about the day of the week it is, and the right size for his shoes, and that he will play basketball one day, even if he can’t run from the bottom of the stairs to the top without losing his breath. He wants to grow up soon, if being a kid means being wrong all the time.  
  
She sighs, and leans back on her rocking chair. It creaks. Kuroko doesn’t like it when it does that. Maybe grandmother will get a new rocking chair soon. “I’m getting old, Tetsuya. Listen to your parents, alright?”  
  
He says, “Yes.”  
  
“Of course you will.” She stops rocking, and the creaking stops. Good, Kuroko thinks. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Tetsuya?” She takes his hand into hers. He’s paler than she, and not much stronger. His mother calls them bird hands. He doesn’t know why. People aren’t birds either. “Stay a little while, your mother will be here soon.” He does stay awhile, even though it’s cold and smells like dust in grandmother’s house, and he’d rather draw more, even if he’d even rather play basketball.  
  
His mother comes soon, though, like grandmother said. He wishes he would grow up faster.  
  
  
  
Kuroko is eight years-old, which is an important age, even though most people don’t know that. Eight is the age when you’re allowed to start playing basketball on the street, which he only knows this because he heard them (them being the boys who play basketball after school and on the weekends) talking about it. No one told him that. No one tells him anything.  
  
He takes his basketball, which has been used twice, and laces up his shoes, which have been used many more times than that, and walks out the door without anyone noticing. This happens a lot. Usually, his mother doesn’t even realize that he has left until he comes back (and sometimes not even then).  
  
They’re playing when he walks up, like they always are, and he looks on for a little while, as one of them leans back and the ball falls through the hoop, the swish of the net strangely fascinating. Kuroko watches it with hungry eyes. He’d like to be able to do that too, someday, too.  
  
One of the boys says: “Let’s change teams.”  
  
And the rest of them nod. Kuroko runs up to the end of the line, holding his new basketball in his hands, the ridges against them yet to be rubbed smooth. The line shortens, thins, as they join teams, until finally, Kuroko is left behind. But that makes sense, because this is his first time joining in. He straightens his back, waits to be chosen. The rest of them slap hands and run towards the court, straight past him as if he were a ghost, invisible, frost on a wire fence. And he realizes:  
  
They had never even known he was there.  
  
Kuroko is eight years-old. He drops the ball on the ground and it bounces, once, twice, rolls to a stop at the edge of the court, and walks away.  
  
  
  
Kuroko is nine years-old. He stares at the ball in his hand, orange, black lines shot through it, the ridges yet to be rubbed smooth against his hands. He raises his arms and shoots at the net; it bounces off the rim. He picks up the ball from where it has fallen. He raises his arms. He shoots again.  
  
  
  
Kuroko is ten years-old, and his new school is too colourful and too big, and he feels more like frost on a wire fence than ever, when everyone is loud and bright and laughing.  
  
In class, the teacher says: “Choose a partner!” Kuroko stands, still and pale and invisible, and waits for everyone to pass him by.  
  
His name is Ogiwara Shigehiro, Kuroko will learn later. He touches Kuroko on the shoulder, and his touch is like Kuroko’s melting, but it’s not the bad kind of melting. He smiles at Kuroko, all white teeth and sunshine eyes, and asks,  
  
“Be my partner?”  
  
  
  
Kuroko is eleven years old. Ogiwara-kun says:  
  
“Hey, Kuroko, why did you start playing basketball?” He throws the ball at Kuroko, who catches it, barely. Kuroko lifts his arms and shoots at the net. It doesn’t go in. Kuroko isn’t surprised.  
  
“I’m not sure,” Kuroko replies. “Everyone said that I could not do it.”  
  
Ogiwara-kun nods understandingly. “Even you had a rebel phase, huh, Kuroko? Who knew."  
  
"That is not what I would call it," Kuroko says.  
  
Ogiwara-kun picks up the ball. His shot goes in, and Kuroko watches the swish of the net as it does. "Oh, right. It wasn't a phase if you're still a rebel now, right Kuroko?"  
  
Kuroko frowns at him. "Ogiwara-kun."  
  
Ogiwara grins. There's sunshine in his smile, Kuroko thinks, like when Kuroko had first met him. Sunshine and blue skies and warm spring days. "You make it too easy, Kuroko." When he tosses the ball at Kuroko again, it bounces off Kuroko's fingers and onto the asphalt. Kuroko watches it bounce; once, twice, rolls to a stop by Ogiwara-kun's feet.  
  
  
  
"Hey, what middle school are you going to?" Ogiwara-kun says one day. He is twelve years-old, and therefore so is Kuroko.  
  
Kuroko blinks up at the sky, the Kuroko-hair blue sky."Teiko. Teiko middle school."  
  
  
  
Aomine-kun is a little like Ogiwara-kun in the way that he grins and slaps Kuroko on the back when they play. He is the second friend Kuroko has ever made, and Kuroko. Two friends by thirteen. An unprecedent. 

 

Aomine-kun is _good._ So are the other four - the other ones who made it onto the first string. Only one of them is in any of Kuroko’s classes: the vice-captain, the one with jewel eyes and perfect grades. Kuroko doesn't like him, which is also unprecedented. Before Teiko, there had just been Ogiwara-kun and everyone else. But now there is Ogiwara-kun and Aomine-kun and the basketball team and the third string coach and his teacher and everyone else. And Akashi. Akashi Seijuro.

Years and years later, he will tell Akashi-kun: “It was because of your eyes. It looked like there was nothing in them.”

“That's a little hypocritical,” Akashi-kun will respond. And he will smile at Kuroko, to show that he means no harm.

And Kuroko will add: “And the way you smiled. It looked like you tried too hard for it to be perfect.”

“You weren't wrong,” Akashi-kun will say.

 

Akashi has achieved more at thirteen than most people could ever hope to gain in their lives.

“We lost,” says the captain of the other team, devastation in his eyes.

“Yes,” agrees Akashi-kun. Captain in his second year, which is nothing short of extraordinary. But Akashi-kun is nothing but extraordinary. “But it was a good game.”

The other captain manages a smile, and reaches out to shake Akashi-kun’s hand. “Yeah, it was. Good luck on your next game.”

“Thank you,” says Akashi, unfailingly polite.

 

Kuroko learns two things at fourteen. 

1\. How to win

and 

2\. How to lose. 

The rest of Teiko _perfects_ the first, until it loses it’s meaning entirely - until it becomes nothing more than the expected. But the second is forgotten somewhere along the way. Kuroko picks up the pieces of it that they have left behind, and tries to remember it for them.

Aomine-kun says: “Why can’t any of you stop me?”

Murisakibara-kun says: “What’s the point of trying so hard anyways?”

Kise-kun, the newest addition to their team, golden and radiant and smiling, says: “Ne, if Aomine doesn’t have to come to practice, why do I?”

Midorima-kun says: “Losing is impossible for us, unfortunately.”

Kuroko hates his invisibility for the first time in years. If he was as charismatic as Akashi-kun, or as loud as Aomine-kun, or even just as big as Murasakibara-kun, maybe he would be able to get them to listen. Maybe he would be able to get them to _stop_.

Akashi-kun says: “I’m Akashi Seijuro.”

Kuroko thinks, maybe, that this is the greatest joke of all.

 

Kagami-kun is a lot like Aomine-kun, which means that he is a little like Ogiwara-kun, and Kuroko likes him immediately, just like how he had liked Ogiwara-kun (and Aomine-kun too), even though he is fifteen and a lot older than Kuroko had been when he had met either of the two.

“What’re your old teammates like?” Kagami-kun asks him, at some point. Kuroko can’t remember the number of times that he’s been asked that, and he answers it differently every time.

_Oh, I enjoyed playing basketball with them._

_It’s just like they are in the magazines,_

_Teiko offered a marvelous sports program, yes._

Kuroko stops, and thinks. He says:

“I felt sorry for them.”

Kagami-kun blinks. Kagami, who judges things by his eyes only, will never understand. But Kuroko envies him for that. To be able to see something and not see everything underneath. 

Later:

Akashi-kun’s eyes are red again. Ogiwara-kun plays basketball. Aomine-kun’s smiles are genuine. Kise-kun and Midorima-kun and Murasakibara-kun have all fallen to Seirin. Kuroko thinks:

 _It’s over_.

 

If anyone were to ask Kuroko how he made it so far, (but no one has, for he’s still a little like frost on a fence wire, invisible, untouchable, but wholly _there_ ,) he would tell them:

“I just wanted to play basketball.”  
  


**Author's Note:**

> so um
> 
> thanks for sticking this through if you did though~~ i really appreciate it!! please tell me what you thought (even if it will destroy my soul) (i love getting my soul destroyed)


End file.
